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Friday, 21 November 2014

Hannah’s Voice by Robb Grindstaff

Review by Bill Kirton

This is a thoughtful,
excellent, well-constructed read which deals with important issues in both
personal and public dimensions.

It starts
at the individual level, narrated by the Hannah of the title. The author is
careful to keep the register consistent with the phraseology, vocabulary and
perceptions of the then six year old Hannah but still manages to suggest the
many things bubbling beneath the surface which will appear later and contribute
to the book’s expansion into a broader commentary on religious and
socio-political manners.

Hannah
stops speaking when she’s six years old. It’s perhaps an extreme reaction to
the situation in which she finds herself and yet the author sketches the
circumstances that lead up to it in a way that makes it understandable, even
inevitable. The figure of Hannah is attractive, sympathetic and quickly
establishes a sort of pact with the reader. She maintains her mutism for the next
twelve years but, in spite of her calm reasonableness, its divisive impact is
felt in her family, the local community, and eventually throughout the USA, with
presidential candidates becoming involved in debates about its significance and
rival factions taking to the streets to voice (NB) their beliefs.

When a
young child is suddenly ‘struck dumb’, it encourages speculation in many areas.
In this case, occurring as it does in a society of believers and churchgoers,
the tendency may be to see it, perversely in each case, as the work of the
devil or a message from God. Equally, there will be those who assume some
abusive trauma is to blame and start enquiring into family relationships. Then,
when events draw it to the attention of a wider public, theories will increase
exponentially and the furore will escalate way beyond its original source. The
result is that questions are asked of the child and the young woman she becomes
which bear no relation to her own inner truth and which increase her
determination to remain cut off from their world and their words.

The series
of events which lead to Hannah’s decision to stop speaking is handled with tenderness
and a clear understanding of how a child’s mind works. She’s a good girl, with
a simple faith which sanitises death by seeing it as moving from ‘here’ to stay
with Jesus and the angels. She tells the truth and is bewildered when adults
ask her the same question over and over when she’s already given them her
answer. Her dead Daddy, whom she loved so much, told her to ‘always listen to
people’s words very carefully to make sure [she] knew what they really meant’.
So when the headmaster, with his own agenda and preconceptions, asks the same
question repeatedly, giving her several chances ‘to tell the truth’, it disorientates
her because that’s exactly what she’s been doing. For her, as for most
children, words mean what they say; sub-texts and coded messages don’t exist.
When her Daddy sang Amazing Grace to
her at bedtime, rather than calm her, its effect was to make her ‘lie there
awake for hours, worrying about getting lost or going blind’.

Without
labouring the point, the author offers plenty of examples of the
miscommunication that’s behind her mutism. As well as the headmaster and her
own mother, there’s the counsellor who’s seeking confirmation of her own belief
that Hannah’s been abused and the fire investigator who believes the blaze was
started by Hannah’s friend Daniel and who ‘asked five or six different times,
in five or six different ways, about where Daniel was and what time it was when
we heard the loud pop’. All these questions are meaningless.

In such a
context, the exchange that was the main reason for her decision to be silent,
has a very sophisticated irony. It happened at Sunday school. Hannah had
prepared the lesson and read her Bible and she had a question. The teacher, the
lesson and the picture all showed Jonah being swallowed by a whale. ‘But’, says
Hannah, ‘the Bible says it was a great fish. Whales are mammals, not fish. Did
the Bible make a mistake?’ It’s an eminently sensible, fair question and yet it
provokes a kind of panic in the teacher, which is then exacerbated by a
hilarious set of exchanges between the other pupils, which ends in the
exclamation ‘You’re a dick’. But it’s
the teacher’s version of the episode, which she recounts later, that turns it
into a chilling harbinger of the strife and violence that’s to come. According
to her, Hannah had ‘completely destroyed the impact of the lesson on those
impressionable minds’. ‘No telling how many little souls were forever lost
because of her,’ she said. The enormous gap between the reality of the event
and its assumed impact is grotesque.

Before
getting to the later stages of the book, there are two more interrelated themes
to note. Hannah’s mother is clearly not quite normal and lots of her quirkiness
is manifest in her attitudes to dirt – both literally and in terms of its
symbolism. She liked things clean. ‘We had to clean the house after we finished
the dishes,’ says Hannah. ‘After I cleaned my room, I dusted the living room
and scrubbed the bathroom sink and toilet. Momma liked the bathroom so clean no
one would ever know we S H I T in there.’ The spelling of the ‘dirty’ word is
to avoid her actually saying it – even in writing. When the children had their
post-Jonah exchange, the teacher called it ‘trash talk’ and, on the occasions
when Hannah unknowingly used a forbidden word, she had to wash her mouth out
with soap. Even lies qualified for the same treatment. Although Hannah never
told any, she was still told to ‘go brush those nasty little teeth before that
lie sticks to them and they rot out of your head’. These are frightening,
terrible images to put into a child’s mind.

And the
obsession with dirt is cleverly used by the author to highlight the workings of
the book’s morality. According to Hannah’s mother, the school has accused her
daughter unjustly of various misdemeanours so, when the two of them leave the
school, they shake the dust from their feet ‘just like Jesus commanded his
disciples to do when they left a village of unrepentant sinners’, an action
given a subtle twist later when, after some violent exchanges between opposing
factions in church, Hannah says ‘as soon as we hit the sidewalk, I shook the dust
off my feet’. The morality being discussed is far from straightforward.

The
vocabulary of good and bad is reflected, too, in that of colour. Hannah’s hair
is ‘dirty blonde’. It’s muddy outside the school. A girl who fell, banged her
head and died while skipping got mud in her hair. Hannah says later that her
‘empty desk whispered to me. Cherubim. Seraphim. Paradise.
Suffer. Resurrection’, while the empty desk of an enemy of Hannah’s ‘creaked and
groaned lie after lie’, causing Hannah to write on her tablet "Beelzebub.
Jezebel. Lucifer. Brimstone. Torment. Gnash. Chaff." Significantly though,
her own desk ‘remained silent’.

So, at the
centre of the book is the fact that Hannah won’t speak because she knows what
she says will be misinterpreted or not believed. The value of words is
questioned and yet the huge paradox is that, because of her silence and her
‘difference’, rival factions arise which, along with counsellors, media people
and others, all desire nothing but words from her – words which they’re
convinced will reveal truths.

There’s
irony, too, in the nature and inspiration of the rival factions. One believes
her to be carrying a message from God which she’ll reveal in His own good time while
another sees her as the spawn of the devil and wants to destroy her. Both base
their ‘faith’ not on anything specific that she said but on two sketches she
drew – one angelic, the other evil. Then there’s a group of anarchists whose
leader was inspired to form a movement when she saw Hannah interviewed on TV,
morphed her into a victim of society with courage but no voice and, as she said,
‘that’s when I realised I had words’ so she formed Voices for the Voiceless.

So
Hannah’s decision as a six year old has brought her to oppression by religious
and social fanaticism, the intrusions of politicians and an FBI investigation.
And yet all she wants is to find her mum and be the normal young woman we know she
is.

There are
other themes, other uses of imagery which thread through the book, all
contributing to and illuminating its complexity. The author handles them all
with assurance and an apparent artlessness, maintaining it as the story of one
young girl and yet, at the same time, offering a profound analysis of some of
the energies, good and bad, which drive Western and especially American
culture.

In the
beginning may have been the Word but problems began when it was interpreted. Among the
many other paradoxes with which Grindstaff plays is the power and yet potential
unreliability of language. Words are so easily misunderstood or distorted to
fit preconceptions. In the end it comes down to ‘there’s nothing either good or
bad but thinking makes it so’, all encapsulated and simultaneously refuted by the
glorious use of the word ‘Pancakes’ and a ‘dirty’ word as Hannah eventually
breaks her silence.